Christmas Sweets

 Here is a bit of a variety of sweets still left from Christmas...walnut crescents, chocolate chocolate chip, linzer cookie, brownie, and raspberry pinwheels.

Merry Christmas

 Merry Christmas!

Wishing everyone a happy, healthy Christmas surrounded by those you love and things that bring you joy.

I've been doing quite a bit of baking for the holiday. Here are a few tasty treats for you to enjoy.

Merry Christmas to All

 Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. I've been busy baking and getting ready. Here are the ingredients to one of my favorite cookies, Raspberry Nut Pinwheels. I hope you are having a wonderful celebration with family and friends.

Usk Sketchmas Day 4

"Seasonal Food" was the prompt for the Usk Sketchmas Day 4. When I think of the holidays I think of all the cookies I used to bake. I always started immediately after Thanksgiving and baked several batches each night. Before Christmas vacation I packed up most of them to give to friends in the school I worked in. It was a big thing when I started passing out cookie tins. One of my good friends and her husband were in Peru adopting their son and had to spend several weeks there thru Christmas. I saved her cookies in my freezer and they enjoyed them when the came home. Now that I'm retired I only bake maybe 3 kinds and I only do a half batch of each. 

For this sketch I headed to Pat's Marketplace in East Islip. I knew they had a bakery area and always had trays of cookies prepared.

Merry Christmas

 Merry Christmas!!! 

I hope your day was filled with joy and that you were surrounded by those you love. 

I know there have been a lot of people affected by the winter storms passing through. I hope you are staying safe and warm wherever you are. It has been bitterly cold here in NY, but luckily we have been able to say warm. Today we spent the day with some of Jerry's family. We enjoyed seeing them and sharing stories. I hope you had a good day too!

My Christmas prep included quite a bit of food prep. My bag of Gold Medal Flour seemed to be my constant companion. Rather than look for something outdoors to sketch, I worked with what I had at hand. Here are a few of the cookies that I made...linzer cookies and rugelach.

Cookies

 Our weather has been grey and dismal for several days. I've gone out to look for inspiration for a sketch but nothing looks good in this gloomy weather. So I set up a still life with my Christmas cookies and the tin they were in. In case you are curious they are (starting in the middle) a raspberry nut pinwheel, a walnut crescent, a Linzer cookie, a Hello Dolly and a chocolate chocolate chip.

Italian Cookies

A friend brought me a box of delicious, Italian cookies the other day. The box was filled with cookies with a wonderful amaretto taste. They were so good! I knew I had to sketch the box...and a few of the cookies too before they all disappeared.

#momentsketchers

Baking Cookies

After dinner last night I started baking cookies. I had prepped the dough before dinner so it was just a mater of putting the dough on the cookie sheet (lines with my red silicone baking mat). Only a few cookies fit on the tray at a time so it took quite a while. The recipe made about 5 dozen Chocolate Chocolate Chip cookies. The bad thing was I had a lot of time to spend near the cookies and ate more of them than I should.